Tom Perrotta’s Subtle Apocalypse

What if the Rapture, the fire-and-brimstone Biblical one, actually happened, but, instead of being stranded to dwell in a hell on earth, those left behind simply continued on, living more or less as before—taking their kids to soccer practice, voting at town meetings, pushing carts through gleaming supermarket aisles, and living under a cloud of dread no more pervasive or crippling than the one that had previously shadowed their lives.

This is the gently unnerving post-apocalyptic world that Tom Perrotta creates in his novel “The Leftovers,” which was published in 2011 and serves as the basis for an HBO series débuting this Sunday. Perrotta’s Rapture occurs on a minor scale: about two per cent of the world’s population disappears in an instant on October 14th. Vladimir Putin, Jennifer Lopez, and the Pope are all taken. Talking heads on cable news try, and fail, to identify a coherent explanation for who was raptured and who was passed over; it was, it seems, a “random harvest.” The U.S. government establishes a bipartisan panel to investigate; people settle on the phrase “Sudden Departure” to refer to the event, and they prepare for further calamities that, for some reason, never arrive. “Nothing happened,” Perrotta writes. “As the weeks limped by, the sense of immediate crisis began to dissipate.”

In the small American everytown of Mapleton, life gets back mostly to normal. A few things are amiss: stray dogs travel around town in vicious packs; a man dressed in a business suit is seen sacrificing a sheep near a bike path in the woods. The novel centers on a nuclear family, untaken yet split apart. The husband, Kevin, is a successful businessman who was elected mayor after the previous guy went unhinged. His daughter, Jill, smokes dope on her way to school and plays a sexed-up modern version of spin the bottle with her new friends. His son, Tom, has quit college and become a follower of a self-help guru named Holy Wayne, who promises to take away people’s pain with “healing hugs” but is more preoccupied with his harem of young wives. Kevin’s wife, Laurie, has left the house, too, joining up with the Mapleton chapter of a cult known as the Guilty Remnant, a quasi-religious organization that dresses in white, smokes sacramental cigarettes, and silently follows the townspeople around in groups of two, acting as ghostly reminders of those who were lost.

In someone else’s hands, these elements might have provided the starting point for a work of science-fiction, or else an exploration of metaphysical or spiritual questions: Where did these people go? What were the mechanisms for departure? What does it mean to live in a world in which such a thing is possible? Stephen King, in a review of the novel for the Times, wrote that it was “the best ‘Twilight Zone’ episode you never saw.” The book presents an eerily compacted conception of the world—as if, for the most part, the town of Mapleton exists in a void—that calls back to those half-hour exercises in What if? But, while “The Leftovers” is Perrotta’s most extravagantly plotted fiction, it is not especially interested in ideas or uncertainty; its concerns are local, domestic—about the real rather than the ethereal. Even the title is an ironic allusion to the inertial power of the mundane—leftovers, tonight’s dinner as tomorrow’s lunch.

Perrotta has, in effect, been writing disaster fiction for twenty-five years—in plainspoken, often funny short stories about coming of age in the suburbs, and in novels like “Election,” “Joe College,” and “Little Children.” It’s just that the disasters have been the cataclysms of middle-class life—personal apocalypses such as illness, divorce, death, infidelity, a transgression against someone that can’t be made right, and, perhaps most essentially, the terror of simply growing up. In “Election,” a high-school teacher becomes obsessed with derailing the political ambitions of one his students, and in his attempts to thwart her manages to blow up his own life. In “Little Children,” a novel about sexual transgression lurking in polite neighborhoods, everyone makes decisions based on spite, toward others and toward themselves. In what is perhaps Perrotta’s finest short story, “The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face,” a father hits his effeminate teen-aged son, an act he knows he can never take back. He imagines what he must look like to his family—“an unhappy man they already knew too well, fleeing from the latest mess he’d made: just me, still trying to explain.” These are stories of rupture rather than Rapture, but the effect is similar: a world just different enough to shift one’s perspective. (Maybe most fiction is disaster fiction.)

The recurring catastrophe in Perrotta’s work is that of children confronting adulthood, or adults faced with the sad fact that they can no longer be children. These are the dramas of “The Leftovers,” as well. The daughter Jill’s great moment of awakening, skinny dipping, has been happening in suburban swimming pools for a century. (“When she climbed out a few minutes later, naked and dripping in front of her new friends, she felt like a different person, like her former self had been washed away.”) Kevin is at his happiest on the softball field, lost in the rhythms of the American game. Rapture or not, life is confusing and hard.

In a wasteland, at least, we’d all be starting fresh. That is the world that the cultists in “The Leftovers” hope to fashion. Of the town’s Guilty Remnant, Perrotta writes:

It was a lifestyle, not a religion, an ongoing improvisation rooted in the conviction that the post-Rapture world demanded a new way of living, free from the old, discredited forms—no more marriage, no more families, no more consumerism, no more politics, no more conventional religion, no more mindless entertainment. Those days were done.

The members of Guilty Remnant are the outliers, however, the loony cultists, and even Perrotta ultimately discredits their credo; the novel’s heroes struggle to reassemble a familiar, sturdy domestic unit. This mood of stasis makes “The Leftovers” an especially apt extended metaphor for the economic recession of 2008—a kind of cultural apocalypse that produced conflicting, ambivalent results. In each case, lives are upended, the flaws of a culture exposed, a system exposed as broken and unfair. And yet, instead of using a moment of collapse as an opportunity to remake the world, we have just returned, stunned and diminished, to our former ways. The old days are not done. Dinner needs to be on the table by six.

The HBO version of “The Leftovers” is loosely based on the novel. The showrunner Damon Lindelof, of “Lost” fame (and, later, notoriety), told the Daily Beast this week that it was the Stephen King review in the Times that caught his eye. (Perrotta is involved with the show as a writer and executive producer.) It’s easy to see why the book’s plot would seem like a basis for compelling, prestige television—a kind of “Walking Dead” as conceived by John Cheever. The novel’s structure remains in place, but the characters have been altered, and the mood tuned to a buzzing unease. Kevin, the protagonist (played by Justin Theroux), is a police chief rather than the mayor, and instead of having him serve as the story’s central sane figure, as he does in the book, the show hints that he may be the most unhinged guy in town. Near-madness, and menace, lurks everywhere in the show’s early episodes; nearly everyone, it seems, is carrying a gun.

Whereas the novel conceived of a place in miniature, the show looks toward a greater world nearing chaos. This maximizing may reflect the demands placed on a televised version of the Rapture—the apocalypse ought to look and feel apocalyptic. Yet, for all the show’s seriousness, there is something almost silly about seeing Perrotta’s fable brought to visual life. The show is scary in the conventional ways of a horror story or a thriller: suddenly everything has changed. In the novel, the scariness emerges from a subtler emotional realism. “Most people just put on blinders and went about their trivial business, as if the Rapture had never even happened, as if they expected the world to last forever,” Perrotta writes of the people of Mapleton. Even after the unthinkable, suddenly nothing has changed.

Photograph by Paul Schiraldi/HBO.

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.